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Walkom: Forget meltdowns. The real nuclear problem is waste

For Canada, the danger of nuclear power lies not in a Japanese-style meltdown. When industry boosters say such an event is unlikely here, they are right.

But what the boosters don’t talk about is radioactive waste. That’s the main hazard, the part of the nuclear question that has never been properly addressed. No one knows what to do with nuclear fuel rods that remain highly radioactive for thousands of years.

The industry talks of burying them. But this is not a real solution. Sealed containers leak. Ground shifts. Over decades, unforeseen events occur.

That’s why the federal Nuclear Waste Management Organization, which is charged with disposing of these used fuel rods, has so far been unable to find a place willing to take them.

The industry-dominated body says that over 40 years Canadian nuclear power stations, (most of them in Ontario) have already stockpiled 48,000 metric tonnes of used radioactive fuel. An additional 2,000 metric tonnes are added to these stockpiles annually.

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Used fuel is toxic and dangerous. It’s the spent fuel atop one of the reactors at Japan’s ill-fated Fukushima nuclear plant that keeps catching fire and spewing radioactive particulate into the air.

Canadian power plants also keep their used fuel rods on site. First they plunk them into pools of water until they cool down. That can take ten years. Then they put them in silos, hoping that — eventually — someone will figure out what to do with them.

Since Japan’s nuclear disaster started to unfold, the industry and its friends have been quick to assure the public that such a thing couldn’t happen here.

Up to a point, they’re right. Ontario’s reactors at Pickering and Darlington, as well as the Bruce nuclear plant on Lake Huron, are not situated near major geological fault lines. Earthquakes in Ontario tend to be smaller than those which routinely rock Japan. A quake along the scale of the one that touched off last week’s Fukushima disaster would be highly unlikely in southern Ontario.

As well, Canadian plants use a different kind of radioactive fuel. Fukushima’s number three reactor, for instance, is loaded with a particularly vicious mixture of enriched uranium and plutonium called MOX that Canadian nuclear generators don’t use.

Still, there are unsettling similarities. Fukushima is an old plant, first commissioned in 1971. Ontario’s Pickering nuclear plant too dates from the ’70s. Two of Pickering’s older reactors have been refurbished. Four more were initially due to be retired within a couple of years.

But Ontario is too dependent on nuclear power to be able to ditch any of its reactors. So these four are to be fixed up instead, in the hope they’ll last until at least the end of the decade.

Indeed, the most unnerving similarity between Ontario and Japan is this dependence. Japan gets about a third of its electrical power from nuclear plants. Ontario, with more than 50 per cent of its electricity generated by the province’s three atomic plants, is even more reliant.

In practical terms, this means that any significant shift away from nuclear power in Ontario is inconceivable to politicians. Both Premier Dalton McGuinty’s governing Liberals and the opposition Conservatives are committed to building new nuclear plants. The New Democrats are opposed — although it’s worth remembering that when the NDP won power in Ontario 21 years ago, their critique of nuclear energy quickly evaporated.

Friends of the nuclear industry like to point out that every energy source has risks. Windmills make noise; gas-fired turbines contribute to global warming; even hydro dams interfere with the environment.

But nuclear waste lasts forever. That’s the real horror of Fukushima — that the spread of radioactive material could make an entire chunk of Japan uninhabitable. We could afford to be smug if we knew how to deal with our nuclear waste. But we don’t.

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